He caught grenades like cricket balls and threw them back

An Englishman of Jewish heritage, Leonard Keysor took a circuitous route to Australia before joining the AIF in late August 1914.

On August 7-8, 1915, he entered the pantheon of Australian military heroes when awarded the Victoria Cross for “most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty” on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Born November 3, 1895, at Maida Vale, London, Keysor emigrated to Canada as a nine-year-old. He joined his sister, who lived in Sydney, in 1914 and took work as a clerk.

On enlistment, he was posted to the infantry’s 1st Battalion of the 2nd Brigade in the AIF’s 1st Division, embarking on October 18, 1914, for training in Egypt before his unit went ashore under fire on April 25, 1915. A month later he was promoted to corporal.

During fighting at Lone Pine, which was among some of the most savage combat of the Gallipoli campaign, Keysor won his Victoria Cross.

The attack on trenches at Lone Pine was to divert Turkish attention from other Anzac operations and British troop landings at Suvla Bay, north of Anzac Cove. Cpl Keysor’s acts on August 7-8 were astonishing in their cold courage and disregard for his own safety.

The fighting was even more treacherous than usual because the Turks covered large areas of their trenches with pine logs which had to be torn away with bare hands while under fire. Inside came brutal hand-to-hand and close-quarter combat.

Lone Pine also had the campaign’s heaviest bomb fights and it was as a bomb-thrower that Cpl Keysor distinguished himself.

The grenade-like weapons of Gallipoli were improvised and at times as dangerous to the thrower as to the enemy. These jam tins stuffed with explosives and jagged metal shrapnel had a three-second fuse which was lit before being thrown.

Historian Anthony Staunton, in his book Victoria Cross: Australia’s Finest and the Battles They Fought, written for the Australian War Memorial, gives a vivid description of Cpl Keysor’s heroics.

“As Turks lobbed their bombs into the Australian trenches, Keysor would leap forward and smother the explosion by means of sandbags; even his own coat served for this purpose, ” he wrote. “Or, if the fuse showed there was time, the enemy bomb would go arching back to the senders. On several occasions, Keysor caught bombs in flight, as if fielding at cricket …

“Keysor, although twice wounded, kept up his anti-bombing activities almost continuously for 50 hours before allowing himself to be evacuated… His performance was one of the most spectacular individual feats of the war.”

Post-war, Cpl Keysor returned to London, married, had a daughter and entered business.

He re-enacted his deeds nine years after the war for a film of his exploits, For Valour, and for this Cpl Keysor used tins filled with flash powder. But there was unintended authenticity when one of the faux bombs exploded and he was burnt.

After Gallipoli, Cpl Keysor served on the Western Front, where he was wounded twice. When World War II broke out he tried to soldier on but was rejected on medical grounds.

Leonard Keysor VC died on October 12, 1951.